by Philip Huynh
“Why are their wetsuits orange?” says Thuy.
“The government recently issued them,” says Yuri. “They think it will be easier for the coast guard to find a drowned body. Smart, no?”
Thuy has met some of the other Vietnamese brides on this island. Once a month they gather in a café or during the summer for a picnic. They have a favourite spot on a hill overlooking one of the inactive volcanic calderas, now a verdant concave green. They are the group wearing sun hats and sweaters in the summer while everyone around them is in shorts. When the Vietnamese wives get together, they are boisterous in their merriment and their frustrations. It is a reminder of how quiet they have otherwise become in this new world. Over summer rolls stuffed with prawns they pass around tips on where the best rice paper is sold or how to cope with having no Vietnamese fish sauce because only the darker, heavier Korean variety is available. What to do when you can’t find fresh turmeric. Tips on the best health clinics — who the most sympathetic doctors and nurses are.
At these picnics the brides wring their hands over their decision to come to this island, or the decision that was made for them. They make the predictable complaints about how disappointed they are in their husbands, which broadens into observations about how strange the Koreans are — eating live octopus, the tentacles still squirming on their lips and between their teeth. The brides know a little about Jun, and some are jealous at what they perceive is his attentiveness and chivalry. They express this jealousy in different ways. Some focus on the failings of their own husbands, while some bend a wrist to show Thuy the jewellery that their husbands have bought for them.
They exchange macabre tales. There was something in the news not so long ago about a Vietnamese wife who was murdered by her husband, thrown over a twentieth-storey balcony. This followed a few months after a similar story. They comfort themselves with reports that those men suffered a mental disability of some sort. Those were not normal husbands.
Thuy sometimes thinks about how the earth yielded itself so much more easily back home, at least in some ways. She remembers spring mornings on the white beaches outside her village. Back home the old women didn’t dive for shellfish. Instead, it seems, they just sat cross-legged on the beach during low tide, as if in meditation, the sand raked smooth by the last night’s waves. Wearing silk trousers and conical hats to keep their faces in shade, they would simply flap their legs, beating gently on the sand with their knees. The clams would emerge by themselves from beneath the ground, awakened by the rhythm, their shells as white as the sand. There to be picked up with bare hands.
Thuy only half-listens to her new sisters. Usually she feels that she has nothing in common with these women other than a language and some other touchstones — books they’ve read or music they’ve listened to — memories of which, she fears, will all fade away. Sometimes, though, one of them will make a certain face or bend her fingers a certain way and Thuy will for a moment believe that she is among her old friends. There was one girl who reminded her a little bit of her friend Diep, another swimmer. This girl didn’t have the mien of a swimmer, but there was something about her expression — that same modest frown in the face of victory.
This girl, whom Thuy called Little Diep, was a bit of a philosopher. She tried to sow the idea among the wives that they were like the Vietnamese expatriates of old — nationalists like Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh who rallied the Vietnamese against French colonialization from the outside. Phan Boi Chau left for Japan, from where in 1905 he published History of the Loss of Vietnam, in which his lament — that the greatest human suffering comes from the loss of one’s country — was a clarion call for resistance. The book became a touchstone in Vietnam’s wars for independence. Ho Chi Minh left Vietnam to study Marxism in Paris and Moscow before returning home to liberate the country. Little Diep said that they, the wives, were the heirs to this spirit of independence, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism.
The other women laughed and flicked lime juice on the girl’s face to douse her reverie. “We are not here to save our country,” they said, “only to make our Korean husbands happy and to send back money to our parents.”
Little Diep only came to a few of their picnics and then disappeared. Thuy assumed the girl must have got pregnant. Until a Vietnamese bride got pregnant on Jeju, she lived a life of pure fantasy, and once she had a baby, her life here became real and she would disappear from the group. It was as if their group was a kind of purgatory until they passed on to the next world — to heaven or hell, Thuy wasn’t sure. The mothers who disappeared were replaced by brides who had just arrived. It wouldn’t be long before Thuy became one of the longest-serving veterans of these picnics.
Of course, there were snickers of satisfaction among the other wives when Little Diep disappeared. Her reveries comparing them to heroes of old were all talk, they said. Yet, since she left, someone else sometimes mentioned Ho Chi Minh and Phan Boi Chau, as if the conversation was never finished. “The difference between Ho Chi Minh and Phan Boi Chau and us is that those men eventually went back home,” said one of the wives. “We are here to stay, and if one of us runs home, it is because she has been defeated by Korea and takes nothing of benefit back with her.”
Yuri refuses to allow Thuy to put on diving weights. Thuy is to keep her body parallel to the surface of the earth, and to stay in shallow water. The shallows are usually reserved for the eldest haenyeo, but Yuri assures them that Thuy is not after their catch. Instead of diving for octopus or abalone, Thuy is given shears to reap the seaweed that sways near the surface. She carries the bundled seaweed on her back, up glistening rocks to dry land. After a few weeks of this, she loses all patience. Yuri reluctantly hands her a belt.
That these old women think they are better swimmers incenses Thuy. She can easily outpace every single one of them to the horizon line. That is, until she loses her breath. Thuy has the muscles of a pony, but she does not have the lungs of a mermaid. The old haenyeo swim without oxygen tanks and must hold their breath underwater. As fast as Thuy is, the darting octopus will forever stay just beyond the reach of her spear because she does not have that one necessary tool: patience. And neither will the abalone at the bottom of the ocean yield to her. By the time these old women settle themselves thirty feet under the sea, upside down and mulling about from rock to rock as if they are in the aisles of a grocery store, Thuy can take it no more and has to dart up for air. Yuri takes back her belt.
Jun is not one to forbid her from doing anything. Instead, he expresses his worries for her. “You’re not safe with them,” he says.
“I have been swimming in the ocean all of my life.”
“I don’t mean the ocean.” In a stammer he reaches for his phone. “The old haenyeo, they are not like us. They are set in their ways.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve known most of them since I was a boy. The world keeps moving, and they are stubborn, to be left behind.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They have a death wish.”
“They do not.”
He will not forbid her, but when fear does not work, he will speak of his dreams. His dream, for instance, of working side by side with her on the orange farm.
“I will still be here, especially for the harvest season,” she says.
Jun tells her there is so much for them to do on the orange farm all year round, even when it is not the harvest season. “Because you are gone every morning, I will have to hire an extra hand,” he says.
“I will make money as a diver. The haenyeo have put their children through university with the money they make.”
“How long will I have to wait?” says Jun, and Thuy no longer knows if Jun is talking about money.
During her first days on Jeju Island, Jun took her to the mansion where the character Sung lived in Winter Nocturne. It has been years since the last episode was filmed there, and the mansion has become a pilgrimage site, one of the few famous houses on the island
that is not made out of volcanic rock. In fact it looks like a mansion on a California soap opera, with slanted roofs and a balcony overlooking the sea. Thuy knows every room by heart — the kitchen where all the heart-to-heart conversations between Sung and his lifelong nanny took place, the den where the girl of the week instigated her seductions.
When Jun took her there for the first time, she didn’t recognize it. It was during a lashing windstorm, and Jun carried an umbrella that he tried to keep between them and the driving rain. The mansion was only depicted on television during sunny days or clear, moonlit nights, not when waves were crashing onto the balcony. She didn’t ask, but she felt that Jun had chosen to show her the mansion in this different context, not as a fantasy house but as a real sanctuary. She left with a greater appreciation of the place, and of her husband’s spirit.
He will not forbid her, but he will try to use her dreams. She has gone alone to the mansion a couple of times since Jun took her, when the weather was fair. Now, during another harsh windstorm, he takes her again. Although on this day it is closed to tourists, Jun knows the owner, who gives him a key. He takes Thuy to the balcony where she can feel the mist from the waves below. He points to the roiling sea. “Right now, there is probably a haenyeo out there drowning,” he says. Underneath his raincoat Thuy can see his baby-blue sweater made out of a wispy type of cotton that flares at the sleeves, just like the one Sung wore. Jun has grown his hair out over the last year and the back of it is fluttering in the wind, while his bangs stick to his forehead, the rain darkening the steel grey. With his flapping scarf and smile, Thuy knows just what part of her imagination he is trying to appeal to.
Not every day with the mermaids is spent diving. Sometimes Thuy stays on land with Yuri to entertain the tourists. Thuy’s relative youth and grasp of English are advantages here, and she finds she can get the tourists to relate to her. She and Yuri have developed a shtick whereby Yuri will pull a live octopus from a red bucket to Thuy’s horror and waving hands. As Thuy tries to rescue it, Yuri will chew its rubbery head off, stretching it like taffy. Thuy spends whole mornings entertaining tourists with a dry wetsuit on.
But even on mornings when she is diving, Thuy still spends most of the day with Jun, stopping by the market before heading home to make him lunch. She knows this is not enough for him. And she knows that he will not stop her from diving, not outright, though he always has a silent plan.
Not so long ago Thuy’s mother emailed her that Jun had stopped sending her the red envelopes. Thuy had not heard from her mother for the longest time, and then to get this in her inbox about her mother’s desperate straits — about the forbidding cost of bare necessities, about the loans from neighbours left unpaid, about the DVDs that her mother can no longer buy even on discount. Whatever Thuy had once made in the market she gave to her mother. Now her mother is alone, fending for herself. Thuy wonders who will be climbing up to the tin roof of their hut to replace the sandbags that secure it now that Thuy is longer able to.
Jun can only smile. “I’m trying my best,” he says, “but I told you, I have to hire extra help since you’re not around. I can only give what I can. Maybe if you came back to me.”
“But I haven’t left.”
Thuy has not even mentioned to Jun the one million won that she needs to raise to join the fishing cooperative that the mermaids belong to. Now that the others know she is serious about doing muljil — the haenyeo’s work — she must pay the money to continue diving with them. Perhaps, she thinks, with just a bit more practice, she’ll be able to pay her dues in abalone. She will get better, and she will send her mother the little red envelopes herself, and she will still have enough left over to pay for the extra farmhand that Jun claims he needs.
These days she leaves the house even when there is no diving, when the storms are so severe that the tourists stay away and the boats stay moored. On such mornings she will go to Yuri’s house, one of the old thatched huts for which the government helps pay for upkeep under its heritage laws. Thuy worries about her friend, who lives alone, and often finds her on the floor, too sore from diving to do anything but play solitaire. High above is a shelf lined with dusty books in Korean, English, and French. Thuy recognizes A Tale of Two Cities. Du côté de chez Swann is another. Yuri catches the upward drift of Thuy’s eyelashes.
“I have always wanted to speak different languages,” says Yuri.
“To be able to speak to the tourists?”
“Sometimes entertaining the tourists is just my excuse to practise languages, nothing more. Do you understand?”
Thuy nods, though she is not sure she does. Ever since Thuy landed on this island she has been speaking less, using language less. Not even her Korean has improved much. She’s been skipping the classes.
“I thought of being a teacher when I was young, but I couldn’t stand still in a room,” says Yuri. Now she is lying flat on her back. Yuri refuses Thuy’s help around the little hut, does not even let her put the teakettle on the stove, but finally relents when Thuy insists on at least massaging her aching joints, from her ankles to her brittle shoulders, and keeping her company on the blanket spread on the floor, playing cards.
“I will pay your dues to the muljil,” says Yuri. “You can pay me back. Low interest.” Thuy does not need to explain to Yuri why she is so grateful for this gesture of friendship. Yuri, it seems, has a sixth sense about what is going on behind the walls of Thuy’s home.
“I’ve known him since he was a boy,” says Yuri of Jun. “I worked on his farm, a long time ago, when his mother was still alive.” That was how she had broken her hip, falling off an orange tree in Jun’s orchard.
“Has he changed?”
“Always the same,” says Yuri. “He was after my daughter, you know. She lives in Busan now, where she went to university. She’s coming to visit me this weekend with her fiancé.”
Thuy does not say anything at first.
“Don’t worry, it was nothing,” says Yuri. “Jun was after a lot of girls before he met you.”
They play a couple of hands, and then Thuy says she has to get home to make her husband lunch. “Come have dinner with us,” says Thuy. “This weekend.”
“But my daughter.”
“Bring her too. I will make Vietnamese food. Jun will make Korean food.”
“I didn’t know he cooked! His mother did everything for him.”
“Then you are curious.”
Yuri gingerly raises herself from the floor and brings down a small jewellery box from her drawer. Inside are two unadorned pearls, large and faintly shimmering — a milky confection with a hint of silver.
“These earrings are a little too large for a young woman like you to wear, but hold on to them as part of your debt.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A family heirloom,” says Yuri. “My great-grandmother dived for these pearls herself, the kind you would never find today. Wear them when you are diving. They’ll keep you, my investment, safe.” Then Yuri’s eyes brighten with a thought. “Oh, wear them to dinner. I want to see them on you.”
When Thuy comes home in the rain, Jun is waiting, scared sick. He thinks that Thuy has been diving in this stormy weather. Thuy says nothing to disabuse him of this notion. Instead, she tells him that she would like to invite her own friends to dinner for once.
Thuy has bought a fresh cloth for the dinner, to cover the same table that Jun uses for his card games. Jun, meanwhile, digs out a clay urn that is buried in the yard containing kimchi. She and Jun share the same cutting board and stove to make their separate dishes. He makes pickled vegetables and raw seafood, and she makes imperial rolls and crepes made out of mung beans, a specialty from her village. There is a frantic rush just before the guests arrive and their ingredients contaminate each other’s dishes; the harsh odour of his garlic has infiltrated her delicate crepes, while her fish sauce has masked the true flavours of his seafood. Both work grimly through to the knock on the door.
&
nbsp; Yuri is at the front door, dressed in pearls and a blue dress. Between her armpit and arm is a Louis Vuitton handbag that her daughter has just brought to her. She looks like a stately grandmother. She smiles at Thuy, then looks up at Jun. “I used to be your farmhand, and now I am your guest,” she says.
Yuri’s daughter, meanwhile, looks as though she has just stepped out of a boardroom. Beside her is her fiancé, a tall man wearing a seersucker suit, a material that Thuy has never seen in her life. He is bearing a bottle of champagne in one hand and a Riesling in the other, bows tied on each. They are both around Thuy’s age. This man, his name is Insuk, hands Thuy the bottles of wine and she just stares at them, as if scared of dropping them, until Yuri gestures to the refrigerator.
“These wines are to be chilled,” says Yuri, then takes the bottles while Thuy returns to the kitchen.
Thuy feels as if she is a waitress in a tavern as she and Jun scamper to serve their guests. In their rush to wash the fish sauce and garlic off their hands, they butt heads at the sink. She worries about the draft in their house that she has just started getting used to. It is some time before Thuy is able to join the table. Thuy learns that Yuri’s daughter is a certified public accountant and that Insuk is a management consultant. Thuy has no idea what a management consultant is, or what distinguishes a “certified public” accountant from any other. What they both do sounds so abstract and glamorous.
The whole point of the dinner is to see what Jun is like around this girl whom he once courted, but the two largely ignore each other. Instead, Insuk and Yuri’s daughter want to hear from the Vietnamese wife, and they are impressed by Thuy’s English. Yuri’s daughter speaks English as well, the best English that a Korean university could provide, though she cannot get rid of her Jeju accent. Insuk’s English, though, is perfect. He went to university in Canada.